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Photos: The world's coolest data centres

Getting creative with data storage.

on Mar 3 2016 6:44AM

Internet service provider Bahnhof's Pionen data centre in the mountains of Sweden easily takes the cake for the data centre most similar to a James Bond villain's underground lair. It adopted both the name and location of a former atomic bomb shelter built by the Swedish government during the Cold War.

It's also the data centre that once hosted Wikileaks' servers.

Image credit: Bahnhof

Pionen opened in 2009, more than 20 years after the site had been decommissioned by Sweden's Civil Defense. It is buried beneath 30 metres of granite bedrock. Bahnhof had to blast holes into the mountain's interior to add 4000 cubic meters of additional space to the formerly 1110 square metre site.

Pictured: Pionen's backup power generators.

Image credit: Bahnhof

The server halls. Pionen hosted Wikileaks' primary web server between October 2010 and July 2011.

Image credit: Bahnhof

Bahnhof decided to retain the unfinished rock walls for the facility's interior. It added an abundance of greenery to simulate the outdoors for the benefit of its subterranean workers.

Image credit: Bahnhof

A lunar-themed conference room is suspended above the facility's server halls.

Image credit: Bahnhof

Bahnhof is known for building architecturally and aesthetically impressive data centres. This is its Thule facility, which contains a night club, disco lights, an ornamental Wikileaks server, and serves its own brand of beer.

Image credit: Bahnhof

The Deltalis RadixCloud data centre in Switzerland is buried 1000 metres into a mountain in the Swiss Alps. The site is the former command and control centre for the Swiss Air Force and was decommissioned in 2007 after outliving its Cold War purpose.

Deltalis bought the facility in the same year and turned the 15,000 square metre site into a data centre, utilising the low-cost cooling provided by the cold mountain air and water.

Image credit: Deltalis

Google took over the old Stora Enso paper mill in Hamina, Finland, and used much of the pre-existing infrastructure to build a data centre.

The site provided significant floor space as well as ready supplies of icy sea water right next door in the Baltic Sea to cool the facility.

The raw sea water is piped through a tunnel to cool the servers, after which the remaining heat is dissipated and the water is mixed in with icy sea water for more cooling.

Image credit: Google

Three of Google's data centres run on 100 percent greywater. The water still needs to be processed, Google says, but treatment for data centre use is much easier than cleaning it for drinking.

Image credit: Google

Hamina is also the only Google data centre to offer employees a sauna.

Image credit: Google

The Citigroup data centre in Frankfurt uses fresh air and reverse water osmosis systems that recover 90 percent of waste water every year for cooling.

Its green roof and front wall of living plants help to keep it cool and, among other energy-saving initiatives, mean the data centre uses only 30 percent of the power of a conventional data centre and only 40 percent of the heating energy.

Iron Mountain’s underground data centre in Pennsylvania is located 61 metres beneath the countryside in a former limestone mine. The facility spans 145 acres and is protected 24/7 by armed guards at the three tonne steel gate. It boasts its own restaurant, fire trucks, water treatment plant and a week’s worth of back-up power.

The natural 52 degree fahrenheit (11 degrees celcius) temperature of the mine and its heat-absorbing limestone walls and floor creates low ambient temperature and geothermal cooling. The facility is also cooled with the help of an underground lake.

Whilst not a data centre per se, the MareNostrum supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre is an impressive visual display.

It is housed inside a glass room in a former 1920's chapel within the campus of the Technical University of Catalonia.

The location was chosen for its proximity to researchers, more than 350 of whom use it for studying computer sciences, life and earth sciences, and computer applications in science and engineering.

It's also the data centre that once hosted Wikileaks' servers.

Image credit: Bahnhof

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